Is Google Gearing Up To Drop The Supplemental Result Label?

Matt McGee reported last week that he noticed that a method where webmasters can see pages that Google places in its supplemental index appears to be disappearing from some of Google’s data centers. Now he’s spotted a comment at SEOmoz from Google’s Matt Cutts which suggests that Google might do away with the supplemental index all together.

From what Matt said:

As I mentioned at SMX Seattle, my personal preference would be to drop the “Supplemental Result” tag altogether because those results are 1) getting fresher and fresher, and 2) starting to show up more and more often for regular web searches.

Is this a sign that Google is actually going to take some action on removing the supplemental results tag from the web results?

Matt said he is afraid SEOs might be “fixated on Supplemental Results and focus on them to the exclusion of other aspects of SEO.” He compares the supplemental results fixation to that of PageRank:

We saw that happen with the toolbar PageRank bar and ended up slowing the update rate on the visible toolbar PageRank to every 3-4 months so that people didn’t spend too much of their time concentrating on PageRank and less on other parts of good SEO

Google has been saying for a while that the supplemental results are not a bad thing. But most SEOs are skeptical of that claim. If supplemental results are equal to normal Google results in every way, then I am all for removing the supplemental tag. But I personally doubt they are equal in every way, and therefore I am all for moving the supplemental status check up within Google Webmaster Tools.

By the way, the method to check for supplemental results works like this. Do a site: search for your site, followed by **** and then -asssdsd. Here’s how it works for Search Engine Land:

site:searchengineland.com **** -asssdsd